Chapter 6: Mr. DNA
guests arrive at the theatre. Raven walks over to the movie screen where a projected version of herfelf hobbles into view, clutching a cane topped with an amber-imprisoned mosquito. * Raven: Oh, here he comes. Well, here I come. walks over to the screen after the screen Hammond appears. Hello, John. to audience Say hello. * Screen Hammond: Hello, Raven! fiddles around her pockets and pulls out a few notecards Oh, I've got lines. * Screen Hammond: How did I get here? * Raven: Well, let me show you. First, I'll need a drop of blood. Your blood. takes out a needle and pokes the screen Hammond's finger with it. * Screen Hammond: Ouch! John, that hurt! * Raven: Relax, John. It's all part of the miracle of cloning. screen shows two identical Hammonds. * Screen Hammond #1: Hello, John. * Screen Hammond #2: Hello, John. third Hammond appears beside the second. * Screen Hammond #2: Hello. * Screen Hammond #3: Hello, John. * Linma: the screen Hammonds continue to multiply and greet each other, flooding the screen. Cloning from what? Loy extraction has never recreated an intact DNA strand. * Spike Taylor: Not without massive sequence gaps. * Kinsa: Palaeo-DNA from what source? Where do you get 100-million-year-old dinosaur blood? the presentation goes on, an animated DNA strand flies out of the screen Hammond's finger, slides down his head and raps on his shoulder. * Screen Hammond: Oh, Mr. DNA! Where'd you come from? * Mr. DNA: From your blood. Just one drop of your blood contains billions of strands of DNA, the building blocks of life! appears behind a blue background and takes over the presentation. A DNA strand, like me, is a blueprint for building a living thing. And sometimes, animals that went extinct millions of years ago, like dinosaurs, left their blueprints behind for us to find. We just had to know where to look. pushes away the blueprint background to show a mosquito on the back of a dinosaur. 100 million years ago, there were mosquitoes, just like today. And just like today, they fed on the blood of animals. Even dinosaurs. mosquito, its abdomen filled with dinosaur blood, flies to a tree. The next scene shows a real mosquito fighting its way through running tree sap. Sometimes, after biting a dinosaur, the mosquito would land on the branch of a tree and get stuck in the sap. next scene shows two animated miners digging underground. One of them finds the mosquito imprisoned in the amber. After a long time, the sap got hardened and became fossilized, just like a dinosaur bone, preserving the mosquito inside. This fossilized tree sap, which we call "amber," waited millions of years with the mosquito inside until Jurassic Park scientists came along. next scene shows a scientist drilling into the amber and extracting the blood from the mosquito with a needle. Using sophisticated techniques, they extract the preserved blood and bingo! Dino DNA! orange background shows genetic codes traveling at light speed as if they are cars and trains, making Mr. DNA dizzy. A full DNA strand contains three billion genetic codes. If we looked at screens like these once a second for eight hours a day, it'd take two years to look at the entire strand! It's that long! And since it's so old, it's full of holes! That's where our geneticists take over! genetic code speeds by, pushing him off screen to show shows scientists in a laboratory, taking eggs out of incubators. Thinking Machines supercomputers and gene sequencers break down the strand in minutes and virtual reality displays shows our geneticists the gaps in the DNA sequence. Since most animal DNA is 90% identical, we used the complete DNA of a frog... next scene shows a bullfrog which later cuts to an actual DNA strand with a hole in it. Mr. DNA carries the letters "G," C," A," and "T." ...to fill the holes and complete the... fills in the hole of the DNA strand. ...codes! And now, we can make a baby dinosaur. scene then cuts to an egg which hatches into a baby dinosaur. * Raven: This score is only temporary. It all has very dramatic music, of course. "Rum pum pum." A march or something. It hasn't been written yet. Then the tour moves on... safety bars click into place, and the seats begin to move, carrying them past glass windows, through which they can see scientists hard at work. * Mr. DNA: Well, look here! Those hard working cowpokes you see behind the glass-- * Sarla: This is overwhelming, Raven. Are those characters autoerotica? * Dejan: No, we have no animatronics here. Those people are the real miracle workers of Jurassic Park. * Mr. DNA: --in unfertilized emu or ostrich eggs. And its no-- * Linma: Wait a minute. How do you interrupt the cellular mitosis? * Kinsa: Can we see the unfertilized eggs? * Raven: Shortly, shortly. * Mr. DNA: Now a whole team of genetic engineers goes to work on-- * Linma: Can't you stop these things? * Raven: Sorry. It's kind of a ride. * Linma: One, two, three. heroes work together and push up safety bars, getting out of their seats. * Sarla: Uh, you can't do that. ...Can they do that? Category:Scenes Category:Raven: Jurassic Park